The Quest 3 display can now run at 207Hz, and almost no software on it can. Horizon OS 2.7 added a setting called Extended Refresh Rates, which lifts the panel from a 120Hz ceiling to 207Hz at full resolution. Developer mode reaches 240Hz, and it gets there by shrinking the image sent to the panel and upscaling it afterwards, so the extra frames are paid for in sharpness.
The change reaches the Quest 3 alone. Quest 3S uses a different display panel that stops at 120Hz, and Quest 2 is not part of this at all. A user posting as Luna on X spotted the setting, and Road to VR reported it.
120Hz has been possible since April 2021, when Quest 2 picked up experimental refresh rate support. Five years later very few apps reach it, because native Quest software is not usually built to render that many frames in the first place. A higher ceiling does not change the work involved in getting near it, and that work is where the last five years went.
Application Spacewarp is the tool that would normally close the distance. It generates synthetic frames, so a game rendering at half the target rate can look like it is hitting the target, and developers have leaned on it for years to reach numbers their code could not reach alone. On Quest 3's processor it stops coping somewhere past 120 frames per second. The technique for reaching high frame rates does not work at the frame rates Meta has just unlocked.
PC streaming is where the new headroom is reachable today, and only part of it. Guy Godin, who develops Virtual Desktop, has already added 144 frames per second to his app, which sends a computer's screen or a full PC VR game to the headset over wifi. Godin says the video decoders start struggling above that, which puts a second ceiling under the first one and puts it a long way under 207.
So the headline figure is 240 and the number anyone is likely to see is 144.
Valve's Steam Frame is the headset this arrives next to. It is standalone, it streams PC VR wirelessly, it also downloads and plays Steam games directly on the device with no computer involved, and Valve has still not given it a price or a release date. Its own high frame rate mode is reported to top out at 144Hz, in an experimental setting. Quest 3 sells for $600.
Extended Refresh Rates is in Horizon OS 2.7 today. The apps that would need it are not.